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Courtesy Jay Dunn/The Salinas Californian -- The front page of the Salinas Californian, Wednesday evening, September 18th, 1963. The caption for the main photo reads: ÒVIOLENT DEATH Ð Some of the 28 Mexican nationals who met violent death near Chualar yesterday afternoon almost ring what is left of a part of a labor bus in which they rode shortly before. A Southern Pacific freight train crashed into the long bus as the vehicle moved over the crossing. The engineer said he blew whistle but was unable to stop the onrushing locomotive in time. (Californian photo.)

Courtesy Jay Dunn/The Salinas Californian -- Photograph leading the front page of the Salinas Californian, Wednesday evening, September 18th, 1963. The caption for the main photo reads: ÒVIOLENT DEATH Ð Some of the 28 Mexican nationals who met violent death near Chualar yesterday afternoon almost ring what is left of a part of a labor bus in which they rode shortly before. A Southern Pacific freight train crashed into the long bus as the vehicle moved over the crossing. The engineer said he blew whistle but was unable to stop the onrushing locomotive in time. (Californian photo.)

CHUALAR — The Southern Pacific freight train pulled out of Gonzales at 4:15 p.m. headed north, hauling 70 cars loaded with sugar beets freshly pulled from the rich, loamy soil of the Salinas Valley. It took eight minutes to reach this small agricultural hub, and by then engineer Robert Cripe had his locomotive barreling through fields of ripening tomatoes, onions and lettuce at 65 mph.

A long flatbed truck, rigged as a makeshift bus with aluminum canopy and parallel benches in the back — essentially a cattle car for humans — rumbled east toward Highway 101 along a private road on one of the Merrill Farms, coming to a stop just short of the tracks. It was an unprotected crossing, so the train’s engineer sounded his warning whistle, but the driver of the truck had what appeared to be an unobstructed view, so Cripe made no attempt to slow down.

When driver Francisco Espinoza looked to his right at that moment, however, his view was blocked by foreman Arturo Galindo, who was in the passenger seat filling out time cards. So Espinoza pulled the truck forward — a fateful miscalculation.

When the train’s locomotive exploded into the passenger compartment of the truck 50 years ago today, it was filled with 59 celery pickers, almost all of them part of the braceros program that brought legally contracted guest workers to the United States from Mexico. Signs dedicating a stretch of 101 as the Bracero Memorial Highway — a memorial to the 32 field workers killed that day — were unveiled at a ceremony Saturday at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas.

The train’s impact sent bodies and straw hats flying, grinding metal against unsuspecting men until there was little left of either. When the engine finally came to a stop half a mile down the track, there was still a corpse trapped under it. In between, the dying and the dead were everywhere. Juan Martinez, who was 11 at the time and returning from shopping with his family in Salinas, recalls being among the first to arrive at the scene.

“People were in pain and crying out for help. It was a pretty sad sight,” Martinez says. “You saw a lot of people just getting on their knees and crying.”

The air was full of dust from the collision, and that would get worse as rubberneckers pulled into the fields to take in the harrowing scene. “The Highway Patrol wasn’t there yet,” says Martinez, who helped lead the effort to create a memorial to the dead. He recalls his father, John, who had fought his way through D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge, jumping out of the family’s 1951 Chevy to begin giving aid to the wounded.

With 32 dead, the incident stood as the worst traffic-related calamity in California history., Espinoza, the driver, was charged with manslaughter but later was acquitted.

“I haven’t seen anything like it since the war,” California Highway Patrol Capt. Francis F. Simmons told the San Jose Mercury that day. “It looked like a land mine or a bomb had hit. As far as the eye could see there were dead people lying around.”

At his home in San Jose, Ernesto Galarza, who would later lead a congressional investigation of the crash, was awakened the next morning by a caller who told him to turn on his radio. “There’s been a farm labor bus collision at Chualar,” the labor organizer told him. “Better come and look. This town is full of dead Mexicans.”

Over the next several days, 189 pints of blood were donated — mostly by other braceros — at the Salinas Red Cross. Salvador Flores Barragan, now 74 and believed to be the only living survivor among the workers, was hospitalized for days before he realized what had hit him. “There were people looking for survivors or dead ones,” he recalled last week, speaking in Spanish from his home in Phoenix. “Then people began coming to bring us fruits as gifts. They would tell me, ‘You were lucky, you survived.’ That’s how I started to figure out I was in the accident.”

Flores Barragan entered the U.S. legally from his home in Zacoalco de Torres, Jalisco, as part of a bracero program that was a relic of a World War II-era alliance between this country and Mexico that brought tens of thousands of field workers, who also helped build the railroads, while able-bodied Americans headed to the battlefields.

Braceros (loosely translated as “manual laborers”) were ensnared by Americans’ ambivalent — and emotionally fraught — attitude toward immigration. During the Great Depression, half a million Mexican workers were repatriated to assure that they wouldn’t compete with Americans for jobs. That policy was quickly reversed during the war, and, by keeping wages meager, proved so profitable for growers that it was continued for two decades. Two million Mexican nationals legally participated in the program during its existence, and yet its ineffectiveness at stemming illegal immigration brought about a law enforcement program actually known officially as Operation Wetback.

“The bracero program did have an inordinate number of transportation accidents, involving multiple deaths and injuries,” says Gary Karnes, a former labor organizer in Salinas. According to a book by Don Mitchell, “They Saved the Crops,” about the braceros, there were 1,205 recorded farm transportation accidents in California from 1962-63, leading to 169 deaths.

Before the bodies of braceros who died at Chualar were finally sent home to Mexico, 32 caskets were arrayed in the shape of a huge cross in the gymnasium at Palma School, a private Catholic institution where many of the wealthiest families in Salinas still send their children. A requiem Mass and rosary were conducted before 9,000 mourners. But in his report to Congress less than a year later, Galarza lamented that the braceros’ sacrifice remained unmarked. “It is inconceivable,” he said, “that this accident should, after a few months, be practically forgotten.”

http://www.todaysworkplace.org/2017/03/31/modern-day-braceros-the-united-states-has-450000-guestworkers-in-low-wage-jobs-and-doesnt-need-more/ Today’s Workplace » Modern-day Braceros: The United States has 450,000 guestworkers in low-wage jobs and doesn’t need more

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